The Heatherwick Effect

What can a designer bring to the world of architecture?

For the façade of a London hospital, Heatherwick imagined the experience of an arriving patient.Credit Photograph by Mark Power / Magnum

For the past few years, an office development tucked away overlooking an old canal behind Paddington Station, in London, has been attracting clusters of people who come to see a footbridge. Made of steel and wood, and crossing the water in eight short sections, the bridge looks ordinary, but, when a boat needs to pass, it arcs up and back from one side like a scorpion’s tail, and folds itself into a neat octagon on the opposite bank.

The Rolling Bridge is the best-known project of the British designer Thomas Heatherwick. Recently, Heatherwick told me that he had started from the premise that most drawbridges look good only when they are extended across the water; when they’re open, he said, they’re “like a footballer with a broken leg.” He hatched the idea of a normal-looking bridge that would reveal its secret only when it began to open, and he figured out a hydraulic system that could be embedded in the railings, so that the bridge would have no visible cables or piers. The Rolling Bridge opens silently, and the whole process seems almost magical, as if the bridge were initiating the movement itself. So many people want to see the bridge in action that its operators now oblige every Friday at noon, whether or not any boats need to pass.

Heatherwick’s designs often seem to have this effect on people. Last year, he completed a seaside café, in the tiny town of Littlehampton, that looks like a beached whale made of strips of rust-colored steel. It is less a building than a sculpture in which you can buy lunch, and it turned Littlehampton into a site of architectural pilgrimage. The Wellcome Trust, a British medical foundation, got a taste of the Heatherwick effect three years earlier, after it commissioned him to spiff up the atrium of its new building in central London. Heatherwick produced a seven-story sculpture made up of more than a hundred and forty-two thousand glass spheres suspended on some twenty-six thousand steel wires, in a pattern outlining the shape of molten lead dropped in water. The foundation is closed to the public, but demand to see the sculpture has been so intense that it now opens its doors once a month to show off Heatherwick’s work.

The popularity of Heatherwick’s designs is a testament to his drive to make his work comprehensible to people who don’t know the first thing about design. A few years ago, a London hospital asked him to reimagine the entrance to its harsh, modern complex. As Heatherwick explained to me, he started “thinking about what it would be like to be an old lady who is ill and being driven to the hospital by her grandson.” This led him to reorganize the flow of traffic at the hospital’s entrance, move a parking area, change the lighting and signage, and, finally, to wrap part of the hospital’s exterior with huge, undulating panels of woven, stainless-steel braid, giving the building a surface of rolling chain-mail bulges. Heatherwick didn’t see fixing the traffic as the practical side of the job and decorating the façade as the aesthetic part. For him, getting the grandmother closer to the front door and making her eyes light up as she saw the kinetic façade were part of the same process.

Heatherwick is a friendly, unassuming man of thirty-eight, with curly brown hair and a face with the soft precision of a pre-Raphaelite figure. He favors jeans and dark-colored shirts, and has the earnest enthusiasm of a graduate student. He grew up in North London, in a large house where his mother, who made beads and enamelled jewels, had a home workshop. He was taught to think of objects less as things to collect than as things to make, and this gave him, he said, a visceral discomfort with the notion of design as a purely cerebral enterprise. At Manchester Polytechnic, where he trained in three-dimensional design, he built a pavilion, a kind of torqued cube made of wood, metal, and plastic glazing, in the middle of one of the college quadrangles, as a thesis project. “I discovered that the university had been going for eighty years, and no architecture student had actually built a building,” he told me. He then went to the Royal College of Art, in London, where his ideas caught the attention of Sir Terence Conran, the design entrepreneur, who had come to give a talk. The year Heatherwick graduated, Conran invited him to build a gazebo on the grounds of his estate. Two years later, Heatherwick set up his own design studio, and he now employs a diverse team of forty-eight people, including a theatre designer, architects, product designers, and workshop technicians.

Even before he went to art school, Heatherwick found the standard design categories confining; he didn’t understand why designing buildings and designing tables should require different sensibilities. “I was just interested in the making of things,” he said to me. This attitude explains why on his Web site Heatherwick organizes his work not by type, the way most designers do, but simply in three groups: small, medium, and large. At the small end, he has designed a handbag that is encircled by a single long, coiled zipper; when unzipped, the purse expands into a tote. At the large end, he is designing a Buddhist temple in Japan, which looks, from the plans, like a crumpled piece of origami paper. Nearly all the projects, whatever their size, have a way of presenting clever solutions emphatically. The studio recently completed a prototype for an expandable dining table consisting of two nearly identical tables that slot on top of each other—Heatherwick dubbed the design “Piggyback.” The legs of the top table slide so neatly over those of the bottom one that the joined tables look like a single piece of furniture. When you want a bigger table, you lift the top table off, and the result is two tables with thinner legs and thinner tops. It is an enticing piece, possessing, like much of Heatherwick’s work, both the wit of an epigram and the conceptual elegance of a mathematical proof.

Indeed, even Heatherwick’s most outlandish-looking structures typically emerge as solutions to specific problems. During a recent lecture at Yale, Heatherwick explained the rationale behind his first, and so far only, project in the United States, a store in SoHo for the French luxury-goods company Longchamp. “They rang up and said they had a great site in SoHo. I imagined one of these glorious cast-iron buildings, so I went, and it turned out to be this runty one,” he said, showing a slide of a plain, modern brick building on Spring Street. “Most of the selling space was upstairs. So the origin of the project was in how to lure someone upstairs.” Heatherwick came up with a colossal swoop of orange steel that cascades down three stories, from the back of the store to the front. It’s scissored lengthwise into strips that rise and fall out of phase, like ribbons, diverging and reconverging at various points to form steps, landings, and walkways.

Heatherwick’s success is giving him more opportunities to do large projects. He is building a hotel in Bristol and redesigning a million-square-foot shopping mall in Hong Kong. He now faces the question of how sharply he wants to tilt his studio in the direction of architecture. “I’m attracted to it because I think there is a place for someone as rooted in making as I am,” Heatherwick said to me. “Today, architects are usually just combining this façade system and that glazing system and this climate-control system. They are specifiers, not designers.” Still, Heatherwick doesn’t yet have much experience with the compromise that full-scale architecture usually entails, and, while he has yet to design a dull object, it remains to be seen whether he has developed the stylistic vocabulary that would sustain him through really big projects. Furthermore, architecture, at its best, is the shaping not simply of buildings but of the way we experience space. Heatherwick’s approach, at least for the time being, is still very much anchored in his flair for creating striking surfaces and forms. At one point, he said to me, “I got interested in buildings because they were the largest objects around, and I couldn’t believe how sterile they were. If you look at an earring compared to a building, the complexity of form is all in the earring.” ♦